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I figured out the twist with the flashbacks pretty early on because the the girl who played Hanna was simply too perfectly cast as a young Amy Acker, and it wouldn't be "Person of Interest" if there weren't wheels within wheels. I did like that Root wasn't the one who had something horrible happen to her, but rather the observer of something horrible. She's sort of like Robot Santa on "Futurama"; she weighed our species on the naughty or nice scale and decided the entire human race came up wanting. She's not amoral but rather a moral absolutist; she feels justified in doing what she does because she's already found everyone she's come across wanting.
It was nice to see Reese shake up her assumptions. A lot of the reviews say that "Person of Interest" just splits the character of Bruce Wayne up into Reese the Body and Finch the Intellect, and I've never felt that's fair. Finch is a programming genius, but Reese is also very, very smart. He wouldn't have made it to where he got in the CIA -- and survived it -- if he wasn't.
I was a little surprised that they reunited Reese and Finch so quickly.

Nice references in this episode tonight. While viewing the episode I thought the first reference to Flowers for Algernon might just be a brief glimpse of the title, which of course did not happen with frequent references to the book. A very topical book for this program, dealing with the augmentation of intelligence and potential improvement of the species. (For those who have not read the book, it is a splendid story.) Other references included Von Neumann, Dyson, and of course Asimov.
I did not see the twist with the girls; but did figure that Root had left the knife in reach of Harold to setup a situation in which information would be divulged. No surprises there.
So they left us with a bread crumb that the Machine may be located in the vicinity of Salt Lake City, Utah. I assume that will factor into one or more subsequent episodes this season.
- Walter.

Fidelity to the source should always be the goal for Blu-ray releases.

Admittedly, I haven't seen last night's yet, but I did catch up on the week 1 episode yesterday. I know it started really with the finale when Reese was speaking to the camera, but I'm not 100% sure how I feel about the idea of the machine being an AI instead of just processing data. It kind of felt like me to be a way to force Root to have motivation for wanting anything to do with it. Other than that it was a good episode, and I like how it seems they're continuing the slow build they did last year.

It kind of felt like me to be a way to force Root to have motivation for wanting anything to do with it.

I would suggest that you have the propositions reversed. While I have not read any interviews with the creators discussing their intentions with regards to the Machine, I believe that the appearance of someone like Root (with that type of interest in Finch) would be the inevitable result of the development of an entity that begins to approach the technological singularity.
Edit: Well, one of the inevitable results, not the only one.
- Walter.

Fidelity to the source should always be the goal for Blu-ray releases.

I agree. And there were plenty of hints throughout the first season that the Machine was self-aware, even though it wasn't made explicit until the finale. When you think of the scope of the Machine's mission, it would pretty much have to be an AI; the critical analysis necessary to draw conclusions from that massive amount of data would be beyond a machine/program that processed data.

Originally Posted by MattH. /t/323888/person-of-interest-season-2#post_3984871
Glad Finch and Reese were reunited. I like Amy Acker, but a little of her in vindictive mode goes a long way with me. Obviously she's going to recur this season. That's OK.

Vindictive towards the government, but I think she generally likes Finch and is coming to respect Reese.

That's it. I researched the gun after Root used it in "Firewall" to shoot Alicia. I had never seen one before and found out that the Double Tap was just introduced recently. Root's is the 9mm version.
The POI armourers really go out of their way to have a variety of different weapons on the show.
Here's the POI S-1 page from a movie/tv gun site: http://www.imfdb.org...rest_-_Season_1

Who in the hell is Root? Can somebody give me a brief history on her?
I must have missed a few key episodes because I have absolutely no idea who she is or what she has to do with the storyline.
Maybe I'm starting to experience those "senior moments", although about 30 years to soon, but I don't even recall her until she appeared this season.

Root first showed up in Season 1, Episode 13, Root Cause, as a faceless hacker manipulating an assassination attempt on a political figure. When Reese and Finch stop her, she taps into Finch's network momentarily and finds out about the Machine and what they do.
She eventually shows her face in the season finale as the person of interest, posing as a psychiatrist. There's a hit out on her, but she arranged that herself knowing that would make the Machine alert Reese and Finch. When she gets picked up by Finch after Reese helps her escape, she kidnaps him instead.

The notion that the Machine is (or is becoming) aware raises a number of possibilities and questions. Harold indicated that the Machine could not be interfaced with remotely (sort of like denying login access except through the console) and it makes me wonder where the show is going with this concept of a sentient or near-sentient computer.
William Gibson covered some of these concepts in his breakout SF novel Neuromancer back in 1984.
"... but the minute, I mean the nanosecond, that one starts figuring out ways to make itself smarter, Turing will wipe it. Nobody trusts those fuckers, you know that. Every AI ever built has an electromagnetic shotgun wired to its forehead."
(Turing is the slang for the branch of law enforcement that governs AIs in the world created by Gibson.)
Did Finch wire in a kill switch if the Machine ever becomes a threat?
Also from Neuromancer -
One of the Turing cops to Case, the novel's protagonist -
"You have no care for your species. For thousands of years men have dreamed of pacts with demons. Only now are such things possible. And what would you be paid with? What would your price be, for aiding this thing to free itself and grow?
Is that Root's goal, to remove the shackles from the Machine to permit it to evolve and grow without the influence or control of humanity?
Anyway, just a couple of concepts that resonated with me in the context of their coverage of these topics in Gibson's SF novel Neuromancer.
- Walter.

Fidelity to the source should always be the goal for Blu-ray releases.